Some people see the child tax credit as a special-interest giveaway to parents, but I argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week that it is just a basic fairness measure.
I showed that without the child tax credit, a family of five would pay twice as much in federal income taxes as would a household of five bachelors with the same aggregate income. The child tax credit almost equalizes the income tax treatment of these two households of equal population and income.
One reader, a man from Tampa named John Boyet, has written to the Wall Street Journal to object to my reasoning. He implicitly grants that the current tax code needs a child tax credit in order to treat families fairly, but he sees that as a reason to overhaul the whole tax code.
Boyet writes that my “comparison of five low-earning bachelors living next door to a higher-earning family of five is more of an expression of opposition to progressive taxes than support for the child tax credit.”
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But again, in my example, both households have the same income and the same number of people, and so I’m not objecting to wealthier people paying more taxes. I’m objecting to taxing a household that includes dependent children twice as much as we tax an identical household that does not include dependent children.
It’s not “progressive” to tilt the tax code in favor of those more able to provide for themselves.